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Og · 01-07-2007, 12:02 PM

So, the biblical stories are literally true because:

1) The bible tells us so

2) The people who delivered the stories that are contained in the bible are described to be holy and immortalized in the same scripture where they deliver their message?

It's neat that you believe that. As for trying to communicate it as fact to other people, this method does not work. If you're trying to communicate it as dogma for people to take as an axiom, then, this works.

Joseph Campbell has an interesting description of the time periods in the old testament (particularly genesis) in his book "Thou art That" which is a collection of his lectures about symbols of christianity and its scriptures.

Quote:

To give a sense of the real meaning of this agricultural mythology, one must examine the actual number of years it takes for the spring equinox to pass through all the signs of the zodiac. Called "the procession of the equinoxes," it takes 25920 years to complete a cycle of the zodiac. Divide that by 60 and you get 432. This number, as we shall see, provides the link between the agricultural mythology and the actual cycles of time.

Some years ago a friend of mine gave me a book, Cooper's Aerobics, that told how many laps a man would have to swim every day in order to stay healthy. A footnote read: "A man in perfect physical shape, at rest, has a heartbeat of about one beat per second." At sixty seconds to a minute and sixty minutes to an hour, in one day of twenty-four hours, the heart beats 86400 times (half of which is 43200). The heartbeat matches the beat of the universe; They are the same. That coincidence of rhythm was the point of the old cosmic mythologies. The latter envisioned this microcosm, or little cosmos, and the macrocosm, or big cosmos, as resonating to the same beat. When a person tells the doctor "I've got a fever," the doctor takes his pulse to see if it registers in harmony with the 43200 beats--that is, to find out if the patient is in tune with nature.

These numbers, anchored in the sumerian discovery that the order of the universe can be discovered mathematically, are found almost everywhere. In the Hindu sacred epics, the number of years calculated to the present cycle of time, the Kali Yuga as it is known, is 432000, the number of the "great cycle" (mahayuga) being 4,320,000. In the Icelandic Eddas, one reads of the 540 doors in Othin's (Wotan's) Hall through which, at the end of the cycle of time, 800 divine warriors would pass to battle the antigods in that "Day of the Wolf" to mutual annihilation. Multiplying 540 by 800 equals 432000.

An early babylonian account translated into greek by a babylonian priest named berossos in 280 B.C., tells us that 432000 years passed between the time of the rise of the city Kish and the coming of the mythological flood (the biblical story derives from this earlier source). In a famous paper on "Dates in Genesis," the Jewish Assyriologist Julius Oppert, in 1877, showed that in the 1656 years from creation to the flood, 86400 weeks (i.e. the span of creation in the first chapter of genesis) had passed. Again, half of which produces 43200.

That's a hint, buried in Genesis, that two notions of God are to be found in its pages. The first was the willful, personal creator who grieved at the wickedness of his creatures and vowed to wipe them out. The other God, in complete contrast, is found hidden in that disguised number 86400, a veiled reference to the gentile, sumero-babylonian, mathematical cosmology of cycles, ever recurring, of impersonal time. During this cycle, kingdoms and peoples arise and recede in seasons of the multiple of 43200. We recall that the jewish people were exiles in babylon for half a century and could, indeed, have absorbed these notions that, exquisitely hidden, provide a subtext of recurring cycles of time in their scriptures.

The mysterious procession of the night sky, then, with the soundless movement of planetary lights through fixed stars, had provided the fundamental revelation, when mathematically charted, of a cosmic order. The universe as living being in the image of a great mother, within whose womb all the worlds, both of life and death, had their existence. The human body is a duplicate, in miniature, of that macrocosmic form. Throughout the whole a secret harmony holds sway. It is the function of mythology and relevant rites to make this macro-microcosmic insight known to us just as it is the function of medicine (recall the 43200 beats of the heart every 12 hours) to keep us in harmony with the natural order.

These old mythologies, then, put the society in accord with nature. Their festivals were correlated with the cycles of the seasons. That also put the individual in accord with the society and through that in harmony with nature. There is no sense of tension between individual and society in such a mythological world. The rules as well as the rituals of such a society put persons in accord not only with their social world, the world of nature without, but also with their own human nature within.

Perhaps when you look at the extended lifetimes of people in genesis it's not expressing a literal fact, but attempting to fit the stories into a description that puts our path to the here and now in harmony with nature?

I still don't understand why people must take these texts as literal accounts of fact given what we know about human nature and all that we know about the history of the origin of the texts themselves.

Yes, the story is supernaturally fantastic. Yes, it has power to speak through it's connotations and can be used to connect a human to the experience of life.

But why oh why must we get mixed up in a literal interpretation of these old texts in their current form without any real appreciation for their context, and the connotations the person who wrote them was trying to include?

Metta